Monitor Your Brand. Do Your Customers and Competitors Know More About Your Brand than You Do? By: Beth Lee-Browning. Sponsored By:

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1 Monitor Your Brand Do Your Customers and Competitors Know More About Your Brand than You Do? By: Beth Lee-Browning Sponsored By:

2 Table of Contents Overview 2 Is Your Brand Healthy? Why Old Metrics No Longer Work 3 The Benefits of Brand Monitoring 4 Approach and Options: 5 Automated Data Collection and Data Compilation with Blosm 6

3 Overview 2. It s more important than ever to monitor your brand and take a proactive approach to managing your reputation. Brands are being talked about, impressions are being made, and decisions are being influenced in real-time twenty-four hours a day. Gone are the days when the only way that a negative experience with a product, brand, or service could be communicated to a large group of people was at a party or a convention. A misstep or bad press in the public arena called the World Wide Web can damage a brand s reputation in a matter of days. Inconsistencies in product pricing, marketing, and brand representation across resellers can also be detrimental to the reputation of a company s brand. Discrepancies in information across sources lead to credibility issues and erosion of a brand s reputation in the marketplace. There is more information available than ever before, however traditional methods of gaining the necessary intelligence have become ineffective. Businesses are constrained by budgets, timelines, and lack the resources to monitor the frequency and volume associated with information being generated across potentially hundreds of sources of content. While the prospect of researching and compiling all of the information may seem overwhelming and complex (such as aggregating content from multiple resources), this white paper explains why it s important and describes options and solutions.

4 Is Your Brand Healthy? Why Old Metrics No Longer Work 3. Customer Satisfaction Surveys, Net Promoter scores, conversion rates, and sales data provide good information but they don t tell the whole story. Given the nature of the internet and 24/7 real-time interaction with and about brands, companies cannot afford to limit how they measure brand performance and reputation to quarterly or annual surveys and studies. The notion of using statistically sound sample sizes of a customer base is outdated and is unlikely to reveal the whole truth. Chris Stutzman, Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst reports that, 81% of U.S. adults use social media to create at least 500 billion influence impressions on products and services. He also states that, 25% of search results for the world s 20 largest brands are linked to user generated content. 1 44% of consumers start with a search engine and use the top search results to find the products they are looking for and 33% start with a retailer site that has the product they are seeking. 2 The use of social media to talk about brand related experiences is exploding; 36% of social media users use at least one platform to talk about their experiences. 3 Knowing how other resellers are representing your brand and what people are saying about your product or brand through social media platforms (user generated content) is a critical component of any Brand Management Strategy. Businesses need the information necessary to execute a strategy that enables the company to manage any negative comments, discover and engage with the brand advocates, and to correct discrepancies. How others are representing or using your products, whether it be a competitor or a consumer can also be a great resource for identifying ways to improve your product catalog or content. Pay attention to the topics being talked about through blog posts and video submissions; they are an excellent resource for creating content and ensuring that you are offering products and content that are relevant to the consumer. With nearly 75% of consumers starting with either search results (which contain both product information and content created through social media) or directly on a resellers website your brand is more exposed than ever before. The volume and visibility of user generated content, coupled with the credibility issues that can arise from inconsistencies in brand reputation across resellers has made it essential for businesses to have a solid Brand Monitoring strategy in place. 1 AdAge CMO Strategy, How Healthy is Your Brand? May The etailing group/powerreviews: The 2011 Social Shopping Study 3 UperVU White Paper, 4 Pillars Of Social Media Success

5 The Benefits of Brand Monitoring 4. Brand Monitoring is the process of following activity related to your brand online. A good Brand Monitoring strategy includes monitoring product information in addition to social output. It involves capturing and acting on information and data from multiple online resources which can include manufacturer, retail, and aggregator sites, expert reviews, product scores, and user generated content. Brand Reputation Protection Monitor Resellers to track pricing, branding, and brand representation/marketing strategy. Uncover unauthorized resellers. Monitor and embrace complaints. A complaint can harm your reputation, but the way you respond to it can protect it. Improve Brand Responsiveness Monitor complaints and turn them into opportunities. Look for opportunities to answer the How do I? public requests for help. It may be an opportunity to make a sale or an indicator of a new product need. Use social media as an alert system to reveal and manage the crisis before it goes mainstream. Improve Customer Experience Incorporate rich content from resellers and social networks into your website, e.g. Product Use Samples, Videos, Images, Product Scores, and more. Utilize customer compliments and complaints to improve product performance and brand perception. Monitor your competitors and resellers to see what they re doing right and adapt it. The key to a successful Brand Monitoring strategy is to find a way to cost effectively and efficiently gather and compile content and data across multiple resources in an actionable format. Options for harvesting this information are discussed in the next section.

6 Approach and Options 5. The approach and tools available for monitoring your brand will differ based on what information is collected and the resources the information is drawn from. 1. Determine what you are going to monitor, which could include: Keywords and keyword phrases used in reference to your brand Mentions of your brand name Products Common misspellings and abbreviations of your brand name Competitors Resellers 2. Identify the Sources, which might include: Competitor and Reseller websites Review sites Industry related blogs Social media sites and Personal blogs Article sites Photo sites Forums 3. Evaluate and Select Tools: Social Media Monitoring Product and Data Monitoring The tools for social media monitoring and crawling websites for data range from basic to highly sophisticated. The functionality will vary greatly from one solution to the next. The goal should be to minimize the amount of manual intervention required to gather and compile the information. Prior to selecting a platform, it s important to ask: What type of data/content can be collected? How many resources can information be collected from? Can the tool compile the harvested content? Can it make sense of the information by aggregating, de-duplicating, and standardizing the data? How will I view and analyze the information collected by the tool?

7 Automated Brand Data Collection and Compilation with Blosm 6. Make the web work for you. Blosm helps organizations: Protect and Manage their brand by enabling the ability to expose product and pricing data from reseller websites Reduce costs and increase productivity by eliminating the need of manual product research, compilation and consolidation of duplicate information Automate the process of gathering rich and diverse data and content from multiple resources Expand competitive research Improve visibility to what s being said about your brand in social media Understand how consumers are scoring your products across multiple resellers There is a wealth of competitive intelligence through expert reviews, product scores, and user generated content. Data about your how your products are being priced, presented, and marketed exists on manufacturer, retail, and aggregator sites. 1. Blosm starts by building profiles of your current product information. Basic content such as SKU or Model number is all that is needed. 2. Blosm suggests sources that can help fill in the content gaps. These sources can be anything from manufacturer web sites, aggregation data feeds, social networks, and web services. Vetted sources can then be added to the blosm workflow to enrich your existing content. As more sources are added, higher coverage and overlap occurs, further improving the quality of your data. The origin of each value is clearly identified so your team can easily verify the accuracy of the content. 3. Blosm provides standardization, de-duplication, merging, and classification of your product intelligence set. This content can be imported directly into your search platform, your PIM, or any database of your choice. Our blosm harvest option allows for regular, fresh intelligence so you can monitor pricing trends and stock statuses. The end result is that you can have the most comprehensive set of information available to implement a world class Brand Monitoring strategy. To learn more or schedule a Blosm walkthrough, contact us at: sales@blosm.com, ph Or visit: